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The Superiority of Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2

How the "public health" establishment brazenly lied about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines compared to natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2.

Since COVID-19 vaccines first received emergency use authorization from the FDA, the “public health” establishment has been propagating the claim that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, is insufficient and therefore that even people who’ve already recovered from infection still need to get vaccinated.

The truth is that studies have shown that natural immunity is robust, broad, durable, and far superior to that induced by vaccination.

In this series of articles, I exposed how the public has been lied to for the purpose of manufacturing consent for COVID-19 vaccines.

7-Part Series on Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2

Related Content

Here are some more selected articles I’ve written related to the superiority of natural immunity relative to the immunity induced by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (with the most recent first).

Fact Check: Yes, COVID-19 Vaccines Were Sold to the Public Based on Lies

Nov 14, 2022 | 4 Comments | 3 min read

Introduction

On October 10, 2022, during testimony before a committee of the European Parliament, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, Janine Small, speaking on behalf of Pfizer President Albert Bourla, was asked whether the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine had been tested before marketing to determine whether it would stop transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2, the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19. She replied, “No. We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.”

While this statement has generated significant attention as an “admission” that the clinical trials were not designed to determine the vaccine’s effectiveness against infection and transmission of the virus, it is not news. Many observers, myself included, have pointed out from the start that the trials for both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines were not designed to determine this. Instead, the measured outcome was one or more symptoms of COVID‑19-like illness plus a positive PCR test.

The fact that so many people have viewed Bourla’s statement as revelatory reflects the general lack of knowledge among the public that the trials were not designed to answer the question of whether the vaccines would prevent transmission, which misunderstanding is no surprise given how the vaccines were sold to the public on the grounds that they would stop transmission and thereby end the pandemic by creating herd immunity.

On October 18, FactCheck.org published a “fact check” article titled “It’s Not News, Nor ‘Scandalous,’ That Pfizer Trial Didn’t Test Transmission”. The article takes issue with online news and social media posts characterizing the Pfizer official’s testimony as a scandalous admission. “The clinical trials did not assess if the vaccine could reduce transmission, and neither the companies nor the government ever claimed they did.”

This objection, however, is deceptive since it overlooks the fact that both pharmaceutical representatives and government officials did claim that the vaccines would stop transmission as though that had been demonstrated in clinical trials. FactCheck.org sets out to gaslight us by refusing to acknowledge that fact. The closest it comes to an acknowledgment is to say, “To be fair, some officials have overstated the transmission protection provided by the vaccines.”

My purpose here is to simply set the record straight. The fact is that the vaccines were in fact sold to the public based on the lie that two doses would provide durable sterilizing immunity that would stop transmission and bring the COVID‑19 pandemic to an end by conferring herd immunity.

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NIAID Director Anthony Fauci (Photo: NIAID, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

ABC News Gets ‘Original Antigenic Sin’ Completely Wrong

Sep 20, 2022 | 6 Comments | 4 min read

Introduction

Months before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first issued “emergency use authorization” (EUA) for COVID‑19 vaccines, I was already warning about the risk of a detrimental immunologic phenomenon known as “original antigenic sin”. I authored General Assembly document A/HRC/45/NGO/43, for example, which was published on September 14, 2020 (three months before the first EUA), in which I explicitly warned of this potential risk of any future COVID‑19 vaccine.

As I summarized therein, “Priming the immune system with antigen components of the influenza vaccine could potentially cause a mismatched antibody response to strains that the vaccine is not designed to protect against, thereby increasing the risk of infection as compared to an immune response in which naive T and B cells are instructed to fight off the infecting virus.”

I warned of the potential for COVID‑19 vaccines to similarly cause this problem. As I had been repeatedly pointing out in my writings and interviews, mass vaccination with these experimental products (EUA status is specifically for FDA unapproved products still considered investigational) could have the opposite of the intended effect, resulting in a prolonging of the pandemic and worsening of long-term outcomes due to the opportunity cost of superior natural immunity.

Naturally, the mainstream media have been almost totally silent about the risk of these pharmaceutical products causing people’s immune systems to become fixated on a suboptimal immune response relative to the immune response induced by infection.

The first and only mention of original antigenic sin that I saw in the New York Times was an article on January 6, 2022, which failed to properly explain this phenomenon much less to communicate its true significance in the context of the global mass vaccination campaign that had been underway for over a year.

The way the Times described it, “original antigenic sin” refers simply to a mismatch between the antigen component of the vaccine and circulating variants of the virus. That is wrong because there can be a mismatch without the occurrence of original antigenic sin. The Times failed to explain that original antigenic sin is when the immune system fails to adapt its responses to be more specific to the newly infecting variant.

The Times also failed to explain to its readers that the immunity acquired by infection is superior to that induced by COVID‑19 vaccines. As I explained in my June 22 article “‘Original Antigenic Sin’ Is a Real Problem with COVID‑19 Vaccines”, studies have shown that natural immunity is robust, broad, durable, and adaptive. The immune system learns to update its responses in the event of reinfection to be more specific to the newly infecting variant. As I also documented in that article, this is not the case for immune systems instead primed by COVID‑19 vaccines.

Instead, the immune systems of vaccinated people remain fixated on generating antibodies specific to the spike protein of the original Wuhan strain of SARS‑CoV‑2, which is now extinct outside of laboratories, with limited cross-reactivity to the spike protein of presently circulating variants.

I further explained how attempts to modify COVID‑19 vaccines to induce immune responses more specific to circulating variants had failed because of original antigenic sin. This failure has been acknowledged by Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which has made recommendations for the FDA to authorize or approve COVID‑19 vaccines for various populations.

The FDA therefore knows about this problem, yet it has proceeded to authorize COVID‑19 vaccines containing Omicron components anyway, without any safety or efficacy data from human clinical trials. This new “Omicron” booster is being sold to the public on the explicit or implicit grounds that it will broaden the immune response to be more specific to the circulating Omicron subvariants, which is a scientifically fraudulent claim.

We have been presented with zero data to support that marketing message, and we can anticipate from data already available in the scientific literature that what these booster shots will do is merely increase antibodies specific to the original Wuhan strain with limited cross-reactivity to the Omicron spike protein, as opposed to adapting vaccinated people’s immune responses to become broader and more specific to the Omicron subvariants.

Apart from the Times’ misinformative acknowledgment of original antigenic sin, the media have remained silent about this demonstrated problem with COVID‑19 vaccines. Another rare exception was published last week by ABC News. The article, published on September 7, is titled “What you need to know about ‘original antigenic sin’ with fall COVID boosters around the corner”. The subtitle says, “Experts are split on the role this will play in the fight against COVID.”

Naturally, though, the article utterly fails to inform members of the public what they need to know about it. Instead, the message delivered by ABC News is completely ridiculous.

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Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (Arne Müseler/CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Fact Check: Yes, Dr. Birx did change her tune on COVID-19 vaccines

Aug 15, 2022 | 2 Comments | 3 min read

__________

politifact

FACT CHECK

CLAIM: “No, Dr. Deborah Birx didn't change her 'tune' on COVID vaccines.” “Birx's past statements show she has remained largely consistent in her view that COVID-19 vaccines do not provide long-term immunity.”

VERDICT: FALSE

Introduction

In an appearance on Fox News no July 22, Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, made a startling admission. She said that she knew that COVID‑19 vaccines were not going to protect against infection and suggested that government officials had made a mistake by overplaying the ability of the vaccines to do so.

This was a reversal of her own position since she was among those who initially sold mass vaccination to the public as the path out of the pandemic. Two doses of COVID‑19 vaccine, we were told, would induce durable sterilizing immunity that would enable the development of herd immunity by stopping community spread of SARS‑CoV‑2, the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19.

This was the chorus of virtually the entire “public health” establishment, from government officials to health care providers. However, there has been a concerted effort by the mainstream media to gaslight us with attempts to deny that “public health” officials like Birx lied to the public to manufacture consent for the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake.

We are not supposed to remember, evidently, how the vaccines were initially sold to the public as being capable of inducing durable protection against infection, which would hence stop people from being able to spread the virus. This episode in history, the mainstream media thought controllers have determined, must be tossed down the memory hole.

“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection, and I think we overplayed the vaccines...”

An instructive example of this attempt to rewrite history is a recent “fact check” article from the Poynter Institute’s publication PolitiFact, which is partnered with Facebook to suppress certain information about COVID‑19 vaccines and public policy.

The PolitiFact article, written by Yacob Reyes, claims that Birx did not change her position. She has always been consistent in acknowledging that COVID‑19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, according to Reyes.

However, Reyes’ argument is falsified even by his own cited sources, which prove that Birx absolutely did reverse herself in terms of her public comments on the ability of the vaccines to prevent infection and transmission. 

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White House Coronavirus Task Force Response Coordinator Deborah Birx delivers remarks during a coronavirus update briefing Thursday, April 23, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks/Public Domain)

‘Original Antigenic Sin’ Is a Real Problem with COVID-19 Vaccines

Jun 22, 2022 | 2 Comments | 6 min read

Introduction

There is a phenomenon in immunology known as “original antigenic sin” that studies have now confirmed to be a real problem with COVID‑19 vaccines.

In brief, what can happen is that an initial viral infection or vaccination can result in an individual’s immune system becoming fixated on generating responses to the original antigen even during subsequent infection with different strains characterized by different epitopes, or molecular structures capable of being recognized and responded to by the immune system. Thus, the immune response to a new strain can result in an inferior immune response in immunologically experienced people relative to the immune response induced by the new strain in immunologically naïve individuals.

Other terms that are sometimes used to describe this phenomenon include “viral interference”, “immune interference”, “antigenic fixation”, and “immune imprinting”.

Of course, the imprinting of an immune response to a virus is not in itself a bad thing. On the contrary, the induction of immunological “memory” to a virus is what provides long-term protection. It is only when a previously primed immune system fails to adequately adapt its responses to a newly infecting strain that the effect can be detrimental.

It is also not necessarily a question of whether original antigenic sin occurs or not; the more relevant question might be to what degree it occurs. For example, it has been observed with both natural immunity to influenza and with flu shots, but since infection induces a broader repertoire of immune responses than vaccination, natural immunity still represents an opportunity cost of vaccination.

In other words, priming the immune system by vaccination comes at the cost of the lost opportunity to prime the immune system by infection, resulting in a fixation of the immune response to subsequent infections with mutated strains that is suboptimal relative to superior natural immunity.

In fact, original antigenic sin has been hypothesized as a mechanism that could explain observations of an increased risk of illness due to the 2009 pandemic influenza A(H1N1) virus, also known as the “swine flu”, among individuals who received the seasonal flu shot.[1]

Policymakers eager to get jabs into arms perpetually fail to consider natural immunity as an opportunity cost of vaccination. I have long been warning that if original antigenic sin turns out to be a problem with COVID‑19 vaccines, the policy aim of achieving a high vaccination rate could result in a prolonging of the pandemic and worsening of mortality outcomes in the long run.[2]

For instance, three months before the first COVID‑19 vaccine received emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the UN published a written statement to the UN Human Rights Council that I authored on behalf of the non-governmental organization Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Inc. (PACE). Published on September 14, 2020, as General Assembly document A/HRC/45/NGO/43, the document included the following warning about the potential risks of forcing COVID‑19 vaccines on the population:

There are many legitimate concerns about vaccines in addition to their non-specific effects. Policymakers do not consider the opportunity costs of vaccination, such as the superiority of immunity acquired naturally compared to that conferred by vaccination.

For example, studies have found that having a flu shot annually could increase the risk of infection with novel influenza strains, as well as with non-influenza viruses, in part due to the lost opportunity to acquire the cross-protective, cell-mediated immunity conferred by infection.

A complementary hypothesis is the phenomenon of “original antigenic sin”, whereby the first experience of the immune system with an antigen determines future responses. Priming the immune system with antigen components of the influenza vaccine could potentially cause a mismatched antibody response to strains that the vaccine is not designed to protect against, thereby increasing the risk of infection as compared to an immune response in which naive T and B cells are instructed to fight off the infecting virus.

This phenomenon might help explain an increased risk of serious dengue infection among Filipino children who received the dengue vaccine and who had not already experienced a prior infection. This finding led the Philippines to the withdrawal of the vaccine, which the government had implemented into its childhood schedule upon the recommendation of WHO, despite earlier data having indicated that the vaccine might cause precisely that outcome.[3]

Unsurprisingly, the phenomenon of original antigenic sin has received scant attention in the mainstream media, which generally do policy advocacy rather than journalism when it comes to the topic of vaccines.

A rare early exception was an article in The Conversation on March 8, 2021, written by Matthew Woodruff, an instructor at the Lowance Center for Human Immunology at Emory University whose research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The current COVID‑19 vaccines are designed to elicit an immune response to the spike protein of the original Wuhan strain of SARS‑CoV‑2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19), which is no longer circulating. Woodruff anticipated that attempts to update the vaccines to generate antibodies specific to newer variants of SARS‑CoV‑2 might fail due to original antigenic sin.[4]

Woodruff’s cautionary remarks, like my own, have proven prescient.

Indeed, it has been demonstrated that a booster dose of an mRNA vaccine modified to express the spike protein of the Beta variant still results in generation of neutralizing antibodies more specific to the original Wuhan strain than to the Beta variant. As the authors of a study published in the journal Cell on January 24, 2022, pointed out, this suggests that “some degree of immune imprinting, or preferential responses to the viral variants initially encountered by the immune system, may affect the development of antibodies against new viral variants.”[5]

Similarly, a study comparing the antibody response in macaques from either the Moderna mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine or an updated vaccine designed to induce antibodies specific to the Omicron variant of SARS‑CoV‑2 found no protective advantage of the Omicron-matched vaccine compared to the vaccine designed to induce antibodies to the ancestral Wuhan strain, which is now extinct outside of laboratories.[6]

These findings help to explain why, despite the acknowledgment that the vaccines are much less effective against Omicron, and despite early promises from “public health” officials that the mRNA vaccines could be easily updated to match new variants, there remains no Omicron-specific vaccine.

Since very early into the mass vaccination campaign, there were indications in the scientific literature that original antigenic sin would turn out to be a major obstacle for policymakers intent on getting the population to accept COVID‑19 vaccines. Several recent studies have now confirmed that this is a real problem, with startling implications for the long-term protection of vaccinated individuals.

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Artistic rendering of antibodies in the bloodstream (image by swiftsciencewriting, licensed under Pixabay license)

Why COVID-19 Vaccines Cannot Stop the Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 Variants

Feb 25, 2022 | 5 Comments | 3 min read

Introduction

The “public health” establishment has been deliberately lying to the public in order to manufacture consent for the policy goal of achieving high uptake of COVID-19 vaccines.

As I’ve been extensively documenting, this includes lying from the start about the effectiveness of natural immunity compared to the immunity induced by vaccination. Due to the inferiority of natural immunity, we’ve been endlessly told, people who have already recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection still need to get vaccinated to be able to have effective immunity.

Relatedly, the official disinformation about natural immunity has been accompanied by claims that everyone must get vaccinated to prevent the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The more unvaccinated people there are, the argument goes, the more chances that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, has to infect people and spread, and therefore the more chances it has to mutate into a variant that could be more infectious, cause more severe disease, or escape the population’s existing immune defenses.

By getting vaccinated, we’ve repeatedly been told, we will be denying the virus the opportunity to evolve.

This might sound superficially plausible, just as many people believed the early false claims that rapidly waning antibodies in people who had recovered from COVID-19 meant that they were quickly losing their natural immunity.

People were susceptible to that disinformation because, as a result of the pre-pandemic vaccine propaganda with which we were always bombarded since early childhood, they had already been indoctrinated into the false belief that circulating antibodies equal immunity; therefore, more antibodies equals better immunity and fewer antibodies equals less immunity.

Similarly, the claims that everyone needs to get vaccinated to stop SARS-CoV-2 from evolving must surely sound plausible to anyone indoctrinated into the false belief that the COVID-19 vaccines stopped infection and transmission of the virus.

It is no secret at this point in time that the vaccines are not highly effective at preventing infection and transmission. And yet, we continue to see the argument coming from the “public health” establishment and the major media that we all need to get vaccinated to stop new variants from emerging.

The false claims about rapidly waning natural immunity depended on concealing from the public the fact that it is normal for antibody levels to wane quickly at first from peak levels reached after an acute infection, and that this is consistent with immunologists’ understanding of how long-term immunity develops. The deception depended further on concealing the fact that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicated that natural immunity would be robust, broad, and durable—likely to last  for decades if not a lifetime.

Similarly, the false claims that the COVID-19 vaccines can stop SARS-CoV-2 from evolving depend on concealing from the public the fact that mass vaccination itself incontrovertibly puts selective pressure on the virus to mutate into an escape variant.

The deception depends on concealing the fact that it is understood within the scientific community that escape variants are more likely to emerge under conditions of suboptimal immunity.

It depends on obfuscating the fact, also uncontroversial in the scientific literature, that suboptimal immunity is precisely what the vaccines deliver.

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Positions of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant compared to the original strain, showing amino acid substitutions (yellow), deletions (red), and insertions (green). (Image by Opabinia regalis, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

NPR Whitewashes the CDC’s Lies about Natural Immunity

Feb 16, 2022 | 0 Comments | 5 min read

Introduction

Recently, CDC researchers published a study showing that people with natural immunity had better protection against the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, than people who were fully vaccinated.

The authors of the study acknowledged that natural immunity offered superior protection against infection as well as against severe disease. The CDC’s press release about the study likewise admitted that this was what the data showed.

This admission marked a reversal for the CDC, which had previously been maintaining that the immunity induced by vaccines is superior to the immunity induced by infection.

Since the start of the government’s mass vaccination campaign, the CDC has maintained that people who have recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection still need to get vaccinated.

At first, the reason the CDC provided for this recommendation was that the evidence indicated that natural immunity was short-lived.

But less than a month after the COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the CDC stopped making that claim. Instead, the CDC began insisting that everyone who had already recovered from infection still needed to get vaccinated because it wasn’t known how long natural immunity would last.

The CDC maintained that position, which implied that there was no scientific evidence to support the conclusion that natural immunity would be durable, until August 2021. At that time, the CDC stopped implying that natural immunity was weak and inferior to the immunity induced by vaccines. Instead, the CDC began explicitly proclaiming that vaccine-induced immunity was superior.

Naturally, the CDC’s recent reversal from that position poses a conundrum for the mainstream media, which have consistently treated the CDC’s proclamations as gospel truth.

Indeed, social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have relied on “public health” authorities as well as the mainstream media’s faux “fact checkers” to justify the removal of posts presenting information that contradicted the CDC’s now-admittedly-false claims about natural immunity.

We should not expect mainstream media sources to rush to report how the CDC had long been lying to the public. We should not be too surprised when, instead, the media attempt to whitewash the CDC’s dishonesty by claiming that the CDC has shifted its position on natural immunity because the science has changed.

This reversal, we are supposed to believe, is simply a result of the CDC honestly looking at the science and being reasonable enough to change its position as scientists acquire more knowledge that overturns previously held beliefs.

This is a familiar propaganda tactic.

Prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the government had claimed that Iraq was maintaining stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), had active production facilities to produce WMD, and had an operative relationship with Al Qaeda, the terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

After Iraq had been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, and the entire Middle East destabilized, the CIA admitted that Iraq had been disarmed by the UN back in 1991.

Rather than honestly reporting that the government had lied to the public, the media helped the government propagate the false narrative that there had been an “intelligence failure”.

That is equivalent to what the media are now trying to do in light of the CDC’s acknowledgment that natural immunity is superior.

The CDC’s own data has literally falsified a claim that the CDC had been making with the specific intent of persuading people who were already immune to get vaccinated, and yet the media are refusing to just come out and state plainly that the CDC has been lying.

The main problem with this new media narrative, like the narrative that preceded it, is that it is demonstrably false.

Instead, the new narrative being pushed is that “the science has changed”, and so the CDC, by recently acknowledging the superiority of natural immunity, has simply updated its position based on brand new information that was not previously available.

The main problem with this new media narrative, like the narrative that preceded it, is that it is demonstrably false.

This new narrative has nothing to do with journalism. It is strictly propaganda, intended to maintain the false perception among the public that the CDC is a credible and trustworthy source of information.

The truth is that the science has not changed. The reality is that, to the contrary, the scientific evidence has continued to mount confirming what we already knew: that the immunity induced by vaccines is inferior to that induced by infection, and that natural immunity is in fact robust, broad, and durable.

That should hardly be revelatory knowledge. It shouldn’t be surprising to anybody. Indeed, it is precisely what we would expect given what we have long known about immunology.

Yet, the media are now trying to gaslight us by falsely claiming that the CDC made a reasonable and innocent mistake, that it is only with the benefit of hindsight, with new advances in scientific knowledge, that we can understand why earlier conclusions that natural immunity is short-lived were wrong.

An NPR article published on February 7, 2022, offers an insightful example of a vain attempt to whitewash the fact that the CDC deliberately lied to the public.

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The NPR building at 635 Massachusetts Ave NW in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ben Schumin, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

The CDC Finally Admits That Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Is Superior to the Immunity Induced by COVID-19 Vaccines

Feb 10, 2022 | 8 Comments | 6 min read

Introduction

In October 2020, two months before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first granted emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who went on to become director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under the Biden administration, claimed that vaccines would be needed to achieve herd immunity because “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection”.

That was a lie.

At the time Walensky made that bold statement, studies had already shown that, in addition to effective cellular immune responses, neutralizing antibodies induced by infection were persistent in the blood of almost all people who recovered. Additionally, it was known that infection induced memory responses, with indications of the induction of long-lived bone marrow plasma cells—a known immunologic marker of long-term immunity—that could rapidly churn out more antibodies in the event of reexposure to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The claim that the vaccines would confer herd immunity by stopping infection and transmission and thereby bring the pandemic to an end proved to be a false promise. The induced sterilizing immunity, or ability of circulating antibodies to stop infection, wanes rapidly so that fully vaccinated people can become infected and spread the virus to others.

Walensky herself publicly admitted this in August 2021 after CDC researchers had learned that 74% of COVID-19 cases in a large outbreak in Massachusetts were fully vaccinated people and that the amount of virus shed by vaccinated people was just as high as that of the unvaccinated, suggesting equal contagiousness. (It was this finding that prompted the CDC to reverse its mask guidance, shifting from telling fully vaccinated people that they no longer needed to wear a mask to telling them that they needed to mask up once again.)

After the FDA issued emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020, the CDC claimed that the available evidence indicated that natural immunity was short-lived.

That, again, was a demonstrable lie.

That falsehood was eventually removed from the CDC’s website only to be replaced with a recommendation for people who’ve recovered from infection to still get vaccinated on the grounds that the duration of natural immunity remained unknown.

Thus, while no longer outright lying, the CDC continued to deceive the public by deliberately withholding the fact that studies had shown that infection was likely to induce long-term immunity.

“...there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection...”

Indeed, in May 2021, scientists confirmed that infection induced differentiation of memory B cells into long-lived bone marrow plasma cells, an immunological marker of long-term immunity. Yet the CDC persisted in its deceitful message that even people who already recovered from infection needed to get fully vaccinated on the implicit grounds that natural immunity might be short-lived.

Then, in August 2021, the CDC went even further by explicitly claiming that the evidence suggested that “people get better protection by being fully vaccinated compared with having had COVID-19.”

That was yet another outright lie, even more egregious than the CDC’s earlier disinformation.

In fact, by that time, studies had overwhelmingly shown natural immunity to be both broader and more durable than the immunity induced by vaccines.

The CDC continued lying that natural immunity was inferior until December 3, 2021, when that disinformation, like its original disinformation about natural immunity being short-lived, was removed from its website.

Nevertheless, the CDC to this day persists in telling the public that natural immunity may or may not offer only “some” protection, in comparison to COVID-19 vaccines that “are effective at preventing COVID-19”.

Additionally, on January 15, 2021, the CDC started telling people with natural immunity that they, too, should get fully vaccinated on the grounds that this would provide them with an additional protective benefit beyond the protection afforded by natural immunity alone. To this day, the CDC persists in telling people who already have natural immunity that getting vaccinated “provides added protection to your immune system.”

However, a study by CDC researchers published on January 19, 2022, in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) not only shows incontrovertibly that natural immunity offered better protection than vaccine-induced immunity against the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, but also challenges the assumption—never studied in clinical trials—that vaccination after recovery from infection offers such a substantial additional benefit that it clearly outweighs the risks from these pharmaceutical products.

In fact, the claim that the data show that the vaccines confer a substantial additional benefit in protection against COVID-19 is conspicuously absent from the new CDC study.

What the CDC’s Own Data Tell Us About Natural vs. Vaccine-Induced Immunity

A picture speaks a thousand words, so let’s start by looking at two key graphs contained in the supplementary materials (not in the main paper) showing clearly how unvaccinated people with natural immunity fared better than people who were fully vaccinated (the first graph showing data from California and the second from New York).

To understand what you’re about to see: the lines on these graphs show the risk of being identified as a “laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 case” (i.e., receiving a positive PCR test) expressed as an estimated hazard rate (the rate of lab-confirmed cases per 100,000 person-days at risk). Don’t worry about not understanding this methodology; all you need to know is that higher up along the y-axis means greater risk, and the x-axis represents time from May 30 into November 2021.

There are four lines: (1) the solid dark blue line shows the risk for unvaccinated people without evidence of prior infection, or people who were immunologically naïve; (2) the dotted blue line represents vaccinated people without evidence of prior infection, or people with vaccine-induced immunity; (3) the dotted light blue line represents unvaccinated people with evidence of prior infection, or people with natural immunity; (4) the dotted black line represents vaccinated people with evidence of prior infection, or people with so-called “hybrid immunity”.

Here's what the respective data from California and New York show:

CDC study shows natural immunity is superior
CDC study shows natural immunity offers better protection than COVID-19 vaccines
In other words, the CDC’s own data falsify the claim that the CDC started making in August 2021 that the immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines is superior to natural immunity.

As you can see, unsurprisingly, by far the highest risk of receiving a positive PCR test was associated with being immunologically naïve. By comparison, the risk was far lower for people who were fully vaccinated.

However, even greater protection was offered by the immunity induced by infection, with or without vaccination.

In other words, the CDC’s own data falsify the claim that the CDC started making in August 2021 that the immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines is superior to natural immunity.

Note that this result holds true even though their methodology biased the study in favor of finding comparably greater protection amongst the vaccinated.

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(Photo: Raed Mansour/CC BY 2.0)

Fact Check: Does Natural Immunity Offer “Little” Protection Against Omicron?

Dec 18, 2021 | 2 Comments | 4 min read

Introduction

An article in the New York Times on December 6 offered tentative good news about the new SARS-CoV-2 variant making headlines, the “Omicron” variant first detected in South Africa. Headlined “Omicron Is Fast Moving, but Perhaps Less Severe, Early Reports Suggest”, the article noted that hospitals in South Africa were reporting that people testing positive are presenting with mild symptoms: “In fact, they said, most of their infected patients were admitted for other reasons and have no Covid symptoms.”[1]

In other words, most of these patients had evidence of infection with SARS-CoV-2 but did not have COVID-19, which is the name of the clinical disease caused by the coronavirus. (Clinical disease is defined as the manifestation of symptoms.[2])

As the South African Medical Research Council reported on December 4, most people in hospitals who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were there for other reasons, with the positive test being “an incidental finding”. Death rates were lower than what would be expected based on data from previous epidemic waves characterized by the spread of earlier variants.[3]

“Prior Infection Is Little Defense Against Virus Variant, Scientists Say”

While severe disease and deaths can lag diagnoses by several weeks, the Times noted that the observations to date were good news. However, the Times dampened the mood with the alarming claim that “early evidence” shows “that prior coronavirus infection offers little immunity to Omicron.”[4]

The link provided by the Times in that statement directs readers to another Times article published on December 2 titled “Prior Infection Is Little Defense Against Virus Variant, Scientists Say”.

The article summary states, “Evidence from South Africa, where the Omicron variant already dominates, shows a high rate of reinfection of people who have already had the coronavirus.”

The lead paragraph reads, “A past coronavirus infection appears to give little immunity to the new Omicron variant rippling across the globe, South African scientists warned on Thursday, potentially tearing away one layer of defense that humanity has won slowly and at immense cost.”

The study being referenced is discussed a bit further into the article:

Scientists in South Africa have reported a sudden, sharp rise in November in coronavirus cases among people in that country who had already been infected, in a study that has not yet been reviewed and published by a scientific journal. The authors noted that there was no such upswing when the Beta and Delta variants emerged.

They did not say how many of those reinfections could be attributed to Omicron, but South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases reported on Wednesday that when it conducted a genetic analysis on a sampling of coronavirus-positive test results from November, almost three-quarters were the new variant.

“Population-level evidence suggests that the Omicron variant is associated with substantial ability to evade immunity from prior infection,” the authors of the unpublished study wrote.

The Times follows that summary with the even more alarming message that natural immunity from infection with prior variants offers no protection against Omicron. The Times quotes a microbiologist from South Africa who said during an online briefing held by the World Health Organization (WHO), “We believe that previous infection does not provide them protection from infection due to Omicron.”[5]

The Times is not alone in claiming that the study by researchers in South Africa showed that natural immunity offers little to no protection against the Omicron variant. For another example, citing the same study, the Australian government’s health department published a statement from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) on December 12 claiming that the study found “that past infection with an earlier variant does not provide significant protection against infection”.[6]

“...data suggest that past infection with an earlier variant does not provide significant protection against infection...”

However, the New York Times and the Australian government are lying.

The truth is that the data that they are relying upon to support the claim that natural immunity offers little to no protection against infection with the Omicron variant shows that, while this variant does appear to significantly escape immunity from prior infection, people with pre-existing natural immunity still have considerable protection and are far less likely to become infected with it.

In fact, the estimated protectiveness against Omicron afforded to people with natural immunity unsurprisingly remains greater than the estimated protectiveness afforded to people who are fully vaccinated.

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An artist's rendering of a coronavirus (image by geralt, licensed under Pixabay License)

Fact Checking the ‘Fact Checkers’ on Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2

Nov 29, 2021 | 4 Comments | 4 min read

Introduction

On November 1, I was notified by Facebook that a post of mine had been deleted on the grounds that it didn’t follow “Community Standards”, which prohibit “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines. My deleted post consisted of the observation that the “public health” establishment has been claiming that people who’ve recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection still need to get a COVID-19 vaccine because natural immunity is inferior, along with the observation that this claim is false.

I supported my counterclaim by linking to the introductory installment of an ongoing series of fully referenced articles I’m producing to document how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other “public health” authorities have been willfully lying to the public, which is demonstrable by simply contrasting what the authorities have been telling us with what the science has been telling us.

Facebook censorship - natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2
On November 1, 2021, Facebook notified me that a truthful post of mine had been censored.

On Twitter on November 9, I observed the social media company telling users that “COVID-19 vaccines are more effective than natural immunity, the CDC and fact-checkers say”. As told by Twitter, the CDC “said that a study showed vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity gained from prior infection, which wanes over time”—thus implying that natural immunity is short-lived while the protection offered by COVID-19 vaccines does not wane over time.

Twitter censorship - natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2
Twitter misinforms users that natural immunity is inferior to that induced by COVID-19 vaccines.

Scrolling down a bit further, I was treated by Twitter to the statement that “COVID-19 vaccines provide stronger and longer-lasting protection than natural immunity, according to the CDC”. (This was truthful enough inasmuch as the CDC does make that claim.)

Twitter followed that immediately with the statement that “Experts caution that having COVID-19 does not guarantee antibodies, while the vaccines have been shown to offer protection against serious infections and death, the AP reported”.

Twitter censorship - COVID-19 vaccines
To support its false claim that natural immunity is inferior, Twitter cites the CDC and an AP "fact check" article citing the CDC.

Thus, Twitter presents the AP article as though it represents independent corroboration of the CDC’s claim, as though the AP had examined the scientific literature and determined that the CDC’s claim was indeed a scientifically proven fact.

Twitter is also implicitly claiming that immunity equals antibodies, that vaccination does guarantee protection, and that natural immunity does not offer protection against reinfection leading to hospitalization and death.

The implicit claim that vaccination guarantees protection is contradicted by the manufacturers themselves, who disclose in their product inserts or FDA fact sheets that their respective products “may not protect all vaccine recipients.” (We’ll come to how ridiculous and totally dishonest the rest of Twitter’s claims are, also.)

Scrolling down a bit further, I came to the AP’s “fact check” post, which states, “Posts continue to circulate online falsely claiming that COVID-19 survivors don’t need vaccines because of natural immunity. In fact, protection is variable and not long-lasting, so vaccines are still recommended.”

AP "fact check", censorship of COVID-19 vaccine truths
An AP "fact check" post on Twitter falsely claims that natural immunity is inferior.

By juxtaposing the description of natural immunity as “variable and not long-lasting” with the supposedly superior immunity from vaccines, the AP is implicitly claiming that the immunity from vaccines is not variable and is long-lasting.

The truth, of course, is that “variable and not long-lasting” could just as well describe vaccine-induced immunity. The difference is that, with vaccine-induced immunity, the description “not long-lasting” is supported by scientific evidence, whereas the claim that natural immunity is “not long-lasting” is demonstrably false.

The AP’s Twitter post links to its “fact check” article, which proclaims that it is “False” that vaccination is unnecessary for people who already have natural immunity, which is to say that the AP claims that it is a scientifically proven fact that people with natural immunity require vaccination to be protected against COVID-19.

The AP’s conclusion is entirely dependent on its premise that infection induces only “short-term immunity” that rapidly “fades over time”. That premise is false.

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Entrance to the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Daniel Mayer/CC BY-SA 3.0)
About the Author

About the Author

I am an independent researcher, journalist, and author dedicated to exposing mainstream propaganda that serves to manufacture consent for criminal government policies.

I write about critically important issues including US foreign policy, economic policy, and so-called "public health" policies.

My books include Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, and The War on Informed Consent.

To learn more about my mission and core values, visit my About page.

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